2. Just Because You Don't Find God Doesn't Mean You Can't Find Something Interesting
When the wide-eyed ten-year-old boy that was me back in 1989 knows that the Enterprise will never find God, you've got problems. I doubt anyone thought for a second that Star Trek would commit to answering the universal question of God's existence. Which meant that whatever was behind The Great Barrier (face palm, face palm, face palm) had be an imprisoned alien waiting to get out. Most Trekkers would point out that Kirk and company have already met a few gods in their time, who turned out to simply be aliens rocking that whole "indistinguishable from magic" thing - and this story was doomed from the start. I think you could make it work - but you'd need something more than a glowing head (why's it always a glowing head, by the way?) to do that. There's no drama or suspense to the film's climax. Even Shatner seems largely indifferent to this sequence - except when Kirk asks God why He needs a starship, which is pretty much the coolest thing Kirk has ever done. And the only thing more predictable than the failure to find God is Kirk's "maybe God's within us" speech. It's a trite and obvious message, inoffensive to both doubters and believers. The last moments of the film at least commit to a bit of a point of view on such matters, coming to a conclusion I like: why worry about God when we should be worrying about the people around us?